The Forgetful Elephant

A Quick History Lesson for Today’s repugican cabal

Today's repugican cabal reminds us of another political party in our nation's history. The repugicans should be cognizant of this history.…

Some beliefs are hard to change.
Today, we have a political cabal that believes the President of the United States is a tyrant and a dangerous man.  This major political party also believes that the president is abusing his political power and is not properly working with Congress, which best represents the American people.  They also believe that the government is overreaching and that this overreaching will ultimately lead to the demise of our great country.
This political cabal is doing everything it can to get the word out about these issues and concerns.  Its backers have major influence in today’s media.  This cabal is aided by its ties to the cults, who often implore their members to vote for this cabal.  This cabal is the cabal of the wealthy.
Despite all this, this political cabal is being pulled about by the major social issues of its day.  The cabal is being torn apart and cannot seem to come to a consensus concerning major issues affecting today’s average American citizen.  At a time where the economy is doing fairly well, many of the best and brightest minds of the political cabal are opting for other, more lucrative careers rather than getting into politics.
Such is life here in 1850′s America.
Wait, what?
Yes, you read that correctly.  The issues of the repugican cabal circa 2013 are eerily reminiscent of the Whig cabal, which became a major political cabal in the United States from the 1830s through the early part of the 1850s.  The Whigs believed that “King” Andrew Jackson was a tyrant who was abusing the office of the presidency, much like today’s repugicans believe Barack Obama is doing.  The Whigs of the 1830s and 1840s controlled the day’s media, largely thanks to the efforts of Horace Greeley at The New York Tribune.  Today’s repugican cabal has a massive media presence thanks to the Koch Brothers and Rupert Murdoch.  The Whigs of the 1830s and 1840s were the cabal of the rich.  The same idea holds true today with repugicans as the “cabal of the 1%”.
What caused the demise of the Whigs of the 1850s was the fact that they were unable to deal with the issue of slavery after the Compromise of 1850, which, oddly enough, was originally a Whig idea by Henry Clay from Kentucky.  Northern Whigs wanted to see slavery abolished while southern Whigs, many of them slave owners, wanted to see the institution of slavery continue.  Today’s repugican cabal is unable to deal with the Affordable Care Act, originally a repugican idea from Mitt Romney and the Heritage Foundation.  As we have seen this past week, repugicans remain sharply divided about what to do with the law.  With the Whig cabal lost out on a central issue it had originally supported, its best and brightest members left the cabal. With today’s repugican cabal speaking out against The Affordable Care Act, we’ve seen the best and brightest member of the party speak out against the law by quoting Dr. Seuss, Ashton Kutcher, and Ayn Rand.
So, what happened to our Whig friends?
Despite the Whig Party’s influence in local and state elections and its ability to elect both William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor to the nation’s highest office, the cabal eventually became too fractured to continue to be successful.  When the fractured cabal ran General Winfield Scott in 1854, who ended up losing convincingly to Democrat Franklin Pierce, it was all over for the cabal.  Ironically, many Whigs in the north regrouped and joined the a new cabal that called themselves the repugican cabal.  Chief among their ranks was a lawyer living in Illinois who had abandoned the party in the late 1840s.  His name was Abraham Lincoln.
Hey. repugicans, are you seeing any pattern here yet?
Fortunately for Democrats, repugicans have never been too keen on picking up on these historical patterns.  The truth is that today’s repugican cabal is essentially the Whig cabal reincarnated one-hundred and sixty years later.  The are deeply, deeply fractured.  We’ve seen that on full display this week via the antics of Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin, Bob Corker, and John McCain among others.  What was once a loose alliance based on wanting to make Barack Obama a one-term president has become an all-out civil war among the rank and file of the repugican cabal and the tea party wing.  Having a national candidate get crushed in a national election and then experiencing very public in-fighting has not helped the repugicans in their efforts to rebrand their political cabal’s image.
And yet, as infuriating as it is to watch with repugicans toy with the idea of blowing up the global economy so that 12 million Americans have access to health insurance, it has brought to light just how rapidly the death rattle of the repugican cabal is approaching.  The repugican cabal is the Whig cabal of 1854.  Their candidate just got shellacked in a national election.  They are currently against an idea that their own people first brought forth and proposed.  They have multiple factions competing for the future of the cabal. They have no visible leader and the country as a whole is losing interest
As much as liberals are enjoying the Hindenburg that is today’s repugican cabal, what it ultimately means is that there is hope for the two party system to re-emerge in a way that is vital for our democracy.  The repugican cabal of the mid-1850s solved its issues on the Compromise of 1850 and eventually came out as strongly anti-slavery, a platform which eventually helped Abraham Lincoln become our nation’s sixteenth president and helped with the passage of the 13th amendment.  Imagine a new political party in 2016 that is against the Affordable Care Act but that is actually against it because a single payer system would be even better for the American people.